Be yourself. Everybody else is already taken.
OSCAR WILDE
Drawing of Oscar Wilde by Matisse (2023)
When I was young, or younger anyway, I really wanted to draw just like Henri Matisse. I loved his way of drawing and I still do. The simplicity, the minimal beautiful, lines. That’s how I wanted to draw. So I copied him, studied him and learnt to draw like him. Technically, it’s not that difficult. or at least it’s not that complicated. Typically a nose in one or two lines, the lips in one, two, three strokes at the most. Ears? He rarely bothered at all with ears.
I’d like to think that I got pretty good at it. Maybe I could have set up as a Henri Matisse tribute act. it’s something that anyone can do with a bit of study and lots of practice and it’s something that AI will probably soon be able to do, if it can’t already, with consummate ease.
Can you tell which of these are actually genuine Matisse heads?
Answer
They are all both by Matisse and not by Matisse. All the elements, nose, eyes, hair, etc, are from different Matisse drawings but compiled by me.
We all have artists we admire and wish we could emulate, don’t we? But do we really? Do we really want to draw like them?
The author Oliver Burkeman has written about this in terms of writing. He talks about how, when he gets writer’s block, he likes to read other writers he admires for inspiration. But, as he says, it’s not really because he wants to write like them.
As Burkemann says, ‘What makes them inspiring isn’t that I want to write like them. It’s that I want to write like me in the way they write like themselves.”
The same is true of drawing. We don’t really want to draw like Matisee, or Picasso, or Hockney or Raphael. I want to draw like me in the same way that the artists I admire draw like themselves.
So we might as well be ourselves, as Oscar Wilde said, and that’s not just because everybody else is already taken but because everybody else is better at being themselves than you or I could be at being them.
While this is all pretty obvious it is not how we are taught to draw.
All the ‘how to draw’ books could just as well be called ‘How to Draw Like Somebody Else’.
I think most of us buy those books not because we really want to draw like somebody else but because we see drawing like someone else, learning the techniques that somebody else has, would be a first step towards drawing like ourselves. It’s like a musician learning the scales and the chords before they can really blow their own trumpet.
The problem is that we have too much technique. We’ve spent so much time trying to be like somebody else that we don’t know how to break out of that technique and ‘just be ourselves’.
When we started drawing we had that being ourselves nailed down. All children start out drawing just like themselves. How could they not? They don’t admire other artists when you’re three. You don’t have anyone to copy at that age. They are not trying to draw like anybody else.
When we go to school we get taught to draw like somebody else.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
PABLO PICASSO
Even Picasso had a problem with this. Picasso, when he was 12, said he could draw like Raphael and that he spent the rest of his life trying to draw like a child. I think what he meant by ‘drawing like a child’ was that he wanted to draw with the attitude of a child, to draw like himself.
That said, there is a lot to be said for copying ‘the masters’, the people we admire. Because it usually ends in failure to some extent and it’s the particular way we fail and the way we overcome that failure that makes it interesting and forces us to find ourselves in it.
Picasso drawing (aged 53)
What the fuck happened to you pal?
